Posted
by
michaelon Saturday October 19, 2002 @06:02PM
from the abnormal-termination dept.

Veeru writes "In my career, I have run across some whopper error messages, but a call from the mainframe sysop one night beat them all: 'We are experiencing MVS processor spin loops, the programs are running while holding a disabled CPU. This is causing XCF communication delays to the point where we are losing VTAM RTP routing, are suffering OSPF adjacency failures on TCP/IP dynamic routing and MIM VCF failures. Whatever this code is, it should NOT be propagated to production or we run the risk of losing the development plex if XCF signaling is adversely impacted by processor disabled spin loops'. My friend once got an error message 'Error 2 while trying to report error 2'. I would be curious to hear from the Slashdot community on encounters with other bizarre error messages."

True story, this message was in Tandy Xenix c. 1982 or so. The Tandy 16/6000 ran Xenix (UNIX System III with a lot of the BSD enhancements) on a Motorola 68000, but used a Z80 subsystem for I/O processing, including the console. This message was generated on the console by the Z80 subsystem. I don't remember exactly what caused it - it was really rare - but it basically meant the system was thoroughly hosed. You could see the message in the "z80ctl" binary if you knew where to look.

I doubt you could get that message past the suits these days. If you did, I'm sure Paramount would demand a royalty every time the message appeared (Star Trek franchiise).

The MacOS Bomb is analagous to the BSOD on Win9x -- lack of protected memory caused some serious shit to happen. (Funny, the Win9x "BSOD" really isn't the official "Blue Screen of Death" anyway -- it's just a blue error message. The real BSOD [rr.com] originated on WinNT and only occurred when some serious shit happened -- like yanking out expansion cards with the power on, or some nasty corrupted driver.)

Now for some snapshots I took myself. My personal favs include KDE's "Sound Server fatal error: cpu overload, aborted" (sorry no pic), this priceless one from Outlook, [216.136.200.194] (I can't make this shit up) KDE's 3D take on the Mac's age-old bomb concept, GNOME doing what it does best [216.136.200.194], and you can't forget Linus' famous "Aiee!" message when the Linux kernel panics.

Well this one is not really an error message. There was a multimedia company that had a promotional floppy (this was before CD's) that had this gag error message pop up on your mac (it's been a while so I might not get the wording exactly right)

"How would you like if I erased all your files?" with two buttons both of which said "OK". If you clicked on the button it would say "just kidding" if you clicked anywhere else it would call you a coward.

Usually, there is an option to fix this in the bios. Normally it's on the first bios setup screen, labelled "Halt on: (list of options)" or somesuch. Tell it to keep keep silent on boot errors, and you can probably yank that keyboard.

When the user specifies an attribute value outside the correct range it's helpful to list the possible correct values. But if the value just has to be non-negative it's much more helpful to say "Value must be non-negative" than to list all the possible positive values.

Fortunately, users never saw this error, as the program ran out of memory while composing it.

I read a case history that was somewhat similar. Except the error message was in Latin. Someone who had once taken Latin was tracked down,
and asked to translate. The translation was something like, "Unto the son is born a brother". When the original programmer was tracked down, he was embarrassed. "But that condition was never supposed to arrive. He had some kind of complicated data structure, where each element could have children and siblings. Except the element at the apex of the tree was supposed to be a special case -- no siblings.

But since it was never supposed to happen the original programmer didn't bother to put a meaningful error message.

Back with good old version 7, make gave error messages like:

make: stop. don't know how to make foo!

if you had typed "make foo" and there was no makefile, or
no rule for foo in the makefile.

When computer naive people (remember them) would ask what computers could do, it was fun to have them sit down and type:

Reportedly, that error message is traditional, and used to be accurate. You'd get that if the printer had jammed in such a way that there was paper pressed on one side against a spinning part, generating heat and paper dust. By the time you got to the printer, it would probably have burst into flames. Of course, the printer could have broken in a less catastrophic way, but people don't tend to complain when their computer tells them their huge printer is on fire and it turns out it's merely broken. These days, of course, printers rarely burst into flames, but if there's something mysteriously wrong with the printer that's not one of the standard problems, who knows? (The message tends to come up if the kernel doesn't understand the printer status quite right)

According to my copy of the BeBook it was actually:double is_computer_on_fire()Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. If the computer isn't on fire, the function returns some other value.and of course the classic:int32 is_computer_on(void)Returns 1 if the computer is on. If the computer isn't on, the value returned by this function is undefined.

Everyone likes to malign the Amiga system crash dialog, simply because it bore the term 'Guru Meditation'. "Ha ha," they joke, "see how primitive and useless the error message was."

You have to understand that this was a massive advance forward. Prior to that, the major systems were first-generation Macs (which displayed a certain number of bomb icons and nothing else); and Apple ]['s, Commodore-64s, and MS-DOS-running PC clones -- all of which displayed nothing; it just (if you were lucky) silently locked up.

Carl Sassenrath [sassenrath.com], designer and author of the Amiga's 'kernel', thought this state of affairs sucked, so he did something about it. Amiga's Guru Meditations, cryptic though they were, told the programmer which task was responsible for the crash (first hex number), and what exception it generated (second hex number). You could then hit the right mouse button to drop into a very primitive serial debugger to get more information. While these numbers were useless to 95% of the users out there, it was information the user could give to the vendor, helping them track down the problem more easily -- information they never had before.

Meanwhile, everyone just happily tolerated Windoze BSODs, even though they were, and still are, no more informative than Amiga Guru Meditations.

Dang, I just tried to replicate this error for a funny screenshot, and apparently XP "does not work after year 2099" either, since it rolls back to 1980 instead of 2100. Maybe if I set it in the BIOS...

The Selecting Blendolini Causes Choco-Banana
Shake Hang From the BSOD-on-my-toaster dept issue was a real error in a Microsoft related program, "Someone's in the Kitchen." There used to be a whole technet article describing the crash involving the choco-banana shake recipe, but it was pulled. For reference, check this out: Q157668 Mystery solved. [wininformant.com]

As the principle software developer on Someone's in the Kitchen (the title helped pay the down payment on my house), I have to say I didn't realize this problem had made it to the published Microsoft Knowledge Base. Of all things...

Though I have to admit, the funniest bug report I ever tracked for that product was a timing error in a.wav file that got integrated into the Kitchen product. At one point, the 'Fridge says "Eeeek! A cockroach!."

Problem was, the wave file was cut short, and the play back of the audio stopped before the syllable "roach."

Needless to say fixing that problem before GM was slightly more important than the Blendolini Choco-Shake hang.

Working in Technical support for a government website frequented by technophobes with college aged children, I can't count the times I have had people scared to death because their computer had encountered an illegal operation. One woman started yelling at her kids for putting that &#*!ing nappy (napster I am guessing) thing on their machine. It took me 15 minutes to explain the situation to her.. after the 10 minutes of telling her to calm down.. at least she wasn't one of the criers.

"Working in Technical support for a government website frequented by technophobes with college aged children, I can't count the times I have had people scared to death because their computer had encountered an illegal operation."

I once worked with this woman with poor vision who was hysterical because something about an "illegal abortion" had appeared on her machine.

She said that she had advised a girl who had made some mistakes on such matters but never was actually involved in such a thing. Only later she realised what it really said.

Apple once put out a C compiler famous for its error messages. Who else would make a compiler that states "This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message"?

Or something to that effect. It was a few years ago, so probably MacOS8. Just the standard error box with no explaination besides "Oooooops"

There's always the old favorite "This application has performed a fatal error and will be shut down: Windows" and the similar "This file appears to be corrupted or infected, and should be replaced: Symantec AntiVirus." I'll post the screenshot of the antivirus one if i find it.

My favorite on the NT servers was a popup explainging that the Dr. Watson process had generated a Dr. Watson error. If the system hadn't frozen I would have screen-capped that bad boy.

Also, twice when using Veritas Backup Exec NT 7.3 I received a warning error messages stating that there were over 1 billion administrators currently connected to the system, so I should be careful making changes. I wasn't aware Backup Exec was so popular.

Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, and disable all services. At no time does Win2k give you a warning that this might be dangerous, but upon rebooting your system will be totally and irrecoverably screwed, as Win2k will tell you that you need the plug and play service to enable any service that you try to enable, INCLUDING the PnP service itself! Reinstalling restored the services to their settings, but it was still not working very well for reasons I cannot understand, so I had to do a clean install to a separate directory!You gotta love MS's monolithic integration...

First time my boss went away and left me in charge of everything, our baby, the SGI Indigo2 ( this was a few years ago) decided to die big style. I am not a full blooded geek so scuse me if I don't describe this right, but...

...screen filled with text, went up the screen rapidly filling the whole thing, I think it was like when you start up and all the boot stuff goes past. Finally the screen flashes then does a sort of blue screen of death and the only text on the screen in the top left is DON'T PANIC.

I swear I saw this, if I hadn't seen this with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it, but there I am, the boss is away for the first time on holiday and the computer is saying 'DON'T PANIC' . I knew things were very, very bad.

Can somebody tell me about this error message, how SGI got to put it on their machines, and why?

(end note is boss was cool as ever and the engineers fixed it and we got our data back, but boy, was I afraid to touch that machine again...)

I hate to ruin a perfectly good story, but what you saw was probably "DOUBLE PANIC."

If an SGI box kernel panics, it does exactly what you described, printing the message "KERNEL PANIC" at the top of the textport and spewing out lots of stack traces after it.

Now, kernel panics are, of course, handled by a handler. (Those panic messages don't happen by magic, you know.) If, on the off chance, your machine should panic, and then panic again inside the panic handler-- apart from meaning something is really, really wrong-- the system prints the message "DOUBLE PANIC" on the screen.

That's probably what you saw. I've seen this many times-- always due to faulty hardware.

Of course, I wouldn't put it past SGI to put a joke in their panic messages. This is, of course, the company that warned users in its workstation owner's guide not to "dangle the mouse by its cable or throw mouse at co-workers."

Many years ago, one of my colleagues fell into a weird situation. He was quite good in Assembler and wrote some quite long program. When he finished, he said that he doubts that the program could work. "I should have done some checks before finishing it..." He compiles the program, gets ready for some long debugging and... the program works... He stares at the screen. "Something is wrong here..." "What?" I ask. "The program works...". "Well it should doesn't it?". "No, it shouldn't, no one can write Assembler in such volume and avoid errors..." "But does the program give the right result?""Yes, but that's impossible! I nearly guessed how to do it. How can it work?.."

So he starts checking the program. Finds nothing. Debugs it, all seems to work. Then he starts to doubt that the results are correct. So he makes two three checks by hand. Then he writes a small segment of the program and things go nuts.He gets back to the whole program and starts debugging it, step by step. In the end, and after taking four times more what took him to create the program, he approaches me with some clear relief.

"There were errors...""So the result was wrong...""No, the result was absolutely right!""!?!""Well, the fact is that I did one offset wrong but in other section of the program, another error in made returned the values to normal. That's why the program worked fine..."

I remember I was using an old Amiga disk-doctor type utility, and I got this wonderful error message:'Cannot mark bad blocks because the block used for marking bad blocks is bad.'Say THAT 10 times fast.I've been telling this wonderful story to my computer friends for ages, and finally, I have an online outlet for it! Yay!

It's really really easy to change your error messages in a pre-OSX Mac system. When I was in 8th grade I got a good shot in at my music teacher. I booted up our studio computer, fired up ResEdit and changed a resourse or three. So instead of "Please re-insert disk" he saw "Hey! I was eating that!" Instead of the standard Error type-11 messages (application crashed - out of memory - restart) he got "what did you do that for? - (poke again)" and the restart / shutdown dialogue was replaced with "play God." - restart, Shut Down and Cancel turned into Resurrect, Eternal Damnation and Have Mercy.:)

The year was 1989, and I was installing Interactive 386/ix (AT&T licensed UNIX) on a pc. At some point in working on the box I got the error "bad magik". I have loved unix and unix-like operating systems ever since. DOS was always boring.

My favorite error message (not really an error, more informational) came from a driver for a Cannon office printer (floor model copy machine + printer + fax) when requesting a size for a margin. The message stated "Enter an integer between 0 and 1.2"

Issue
After leaving a slider pop-up open, the user switches to another functio] such as accessing a menu or testing a movie. Flash then behaves unexpectedly. Sometimes an error message appears which states:

Back in the 80s, we got an Amiga 1000, and my dad was trying to hook up an apple image writer to the serial port. Apparently, the Amiga would dump error messages to the serial port, expecting a terminal to be connected. So at some point, he tries to print something, it doesn't work, the machine trys printing an error message to the serial port. So the printer makes it laborious dot matrix printing noises, and then advances the paper, which says "Printer not found".

This story [bell-labs.com] from Dennis Ritchie tells of an error message in old versions of Unix that was actually sort of a Bell Labs version of "All your base".

From personal experience, one that sticks out in my mind is from Microsoft's Flight Simulator. If you auger into the ground, it says "Crash". If you bellyflop into Lake Michigan it says "Splash". But if you make a perfect landing, forgetting the minor detail of putting down your landing gear, it'd say "Crash! Lower your gear next time!" This message dates all the way back to MFS 1.0.

"Tech support."
"The printer doesn't work."
"Is there an error? What does it say?"
"It's all the way in the next room."
"Ma'am, I need to know the error."
"It says printer error."
"Could you read me exactly what is says?"
"I remembered. That's what it says. Printer error."
"Ok, ma'am? You're talking to the guy that wrote the software. I know for a fact that it doesn't say printer error, because I never wrote an error message that says printer error. Now please put down the phone, go into the other room, and read me the real message."
*click*

I was programming back in the Good 'ol Days, and one of those ACTUALLY HAPPENED! I was programming in QBX under PC-DOS 7.0, and nothing was working right... so i suck in a statement similar to the following, and it executed!:

if 1=2 then print "OOPS!"

Needless to say, I didnt go back to programming for the rest of the day...